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Iran 'as dangerous as al-Qaeda'
06/09/2006 08:45 - (SA)
Washington - US President George W Bush on Tuesday branded Iran's leaders tyrants as dangerous as al-Qaeda terrorists and said they must not be allowed to get nuclear weapons - "the tools of mass murder".
"The world's free nations will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon," he said.
The sharp escalation in rhetoric came as Bush made the second of a series of speeches on the war on terrorism in the run up to November US legislative elections expected to be overshadowed by the unpopular war in Iraq.
US not yet safe
It followed the White House's release of a 23-page anti-terrorism strategy that called Iran and Syria "especially worrisome" threats and downplayed the role of the Iraq war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in fuelling terrorism.
The report also warned the US was "not yet safe" from terrorism five years after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
In Vienna, the US ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Gregory Schulte, said that "the time has come for the (United Nations) security council to back international diplomacy with international sanctions".
'America will not bow down to tyrants'
Bush made no explicit reference to sanctions in his speech but stressed that: "The world is working together to prevent Iran's regime from acquiring the tools of mass murder."
Quoting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying last month that the United States must "bow down" before Iran, the US president fired back: "America will not bow down to tyrants."
Bush accused Iran of funding the Lebanese Shi'ite militia Hezbollah and other groups in order to attack Israel and the United States "by proxy" and said Tehran aimed to dominate its neighbours.
Just as dangerous as al-Qaeda
"Like al-Qaeda and the Sunni extremists, the Iranian regime has clear aims. They want to drive America out of the region, to destroy Israel, and to dominate the broader Middle East," said the US president.
"The Shia strain of Islamic radicalism is just as dangerous and just as hostile to America and just as determined to establish its brand of hegemony across the broader Middle East" as al-Qaeda, he said.
But, he said, Shi'ite extremists have done something al-Qaeda only dreams of by taking over Iran in 1979, "subjugating its proud people to a regime of tyranny and using that nation's resources to fund the spread of terror and to pursue their radical agenda".
"The Iranian regime and its terrorist proxies have demonstrated their willingness to kill Americans, and now the Iranian regime is pursuing nuclear weapons," said Bush.
Tehran has insisted that it seeks only civilian nuclear power, but has rejected an incentives package from the United States, France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany in return for freezing uranium enrichment.
- AFP
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